Sean Hannity: Trump's Supreme Court pick is a home run, and a promise kept

President Trump said he would select an originalist and a constitutionalist to serve on the Supreme Court

President Trump's choice of Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court is yet another example of the new commander-in-chief keeping promises to the American people.

Trump announced the choice in a prime time appearance, and noted that Gorsuch’s impeccable resume and originalist approach to the Constitution showed he was following through on his campaign pledge, a novel concept in Washington.

“When Justice Scalia passed away suddenly last February, I made a promise to the American people,” Trump said. “If I were elected president, I would find the very best judge in the country for the Supreme Court.

“Today, I am keeping another promise to the American people by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuchm” he also said.

During the campaign, I asked then-candidate Trump several times what he was looking for in a justice. He said above all, he wanted a justice who will strictly adhere to the original meaning of the words of the Constitution. And he offered up a list of several accomplished jurists who fit that bill and checked other boxes he believed were crucial.

“I want great intellect,” he said. “These people are all of very high, high intellect. They're pro-life.”

President Trump was adamant about nominating a justice who believes in coequal branches of government, separation of powers, not somebody who will legislate from the bench, who will read and interpret the U.S. Constitution the way our Founding Fathers and framers intended.

Judge Gorsuch is only 49 years old. He clerked for several prominent judges, including Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. In 2006, he was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, where he currently serves, and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a unanimous voice vote.

Judge Gorsuch is also known for being a strong defender of religious liberty. In his key rulings, he sided with Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor in their case against the Obama administration's contraception mandate.

Consider what he said on originalism during a lecture about Justice Antonin Scalia just last year.

“It seems to me that an assiduous focus on text, structure and history is essential to being a good judge,” he told law students at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. “That, yes, judges should be in the business of declaring what the law is using the traditional tools of interpretation, rather than pronouncing the law as they might wish it to be in light of their own views, always with an eye on the outcome, engaged, perhaps, in some Benthamite calculation of pleasures and pains along the way.”

An originalist, intellectual and patriot for the Supreme Court. And a home run for President Trump.